The Vanishing

Anthony Kaufman writes that the commercial demise of VHS videotape has caused scores of lesser-known films to effectively vanish from the culture.

This is occurring because studios can’t be bothered to prep expensive DVD-quality masters for some of the more obscure material in their back catalogs, a decision that’s a business choice made increasingly understandable in a turbulent economy. But meanwhile, as Walter Olson mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago on PJM Political, great chunks of childrens’ books published prior to 1985 are vanishing from used book stores and library shelves, as a result of heavy-handed government legislation.

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G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the past is the “democracy of the dead”, but as Mark Steyn wrote in 2005, “A nation’s collective memory is the unseen seven-eighths of the iceberg. When you sever that, what’s left just bobs around on the surface, unmoored in every sense.” And our already present-tense culture is risking a history that could be shrinking even more at a surprising rate.

Update: So what small slice of 20th century history does at least one legislator want to see vanish next? Barbie. No, really!

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